Repeating British mistakes.

• Author: Clarke, Jonathan

Now that we have passed the second anniversary of foreign policy under the Clinton administration, critics have sated themselves on easy pickings. But more recently a new direction has crept into view, as commentators turn away from well-practiced lambast in favor of more sympathetic attempts to explore - or even to validate - the underlying patterns beneath the surface chaos. The tentative indications of a more assured grasp of national priorities in the White House in early 1995, notably the quietly effective diplomacy with regard to North Korea and Vietnam, further encourage erstwhile critics to ponder whether a new foreign policy rationale is emerging.

This revisionist approach is sure to produce any number of interesting theories as to why foreign policy seems to be less accident prone, but one that does seem worth further investigation is that, in terms of operational practicality, post-Cold War experience is teaching that American foreign policy succeeds best when its practitioners acknowledge - whether explicitly or implicitly - that American power is a much more ambiguous quantity today than it was during the Cold War. An aggressively robust foreign policy is impossible when both congressional and popular opinion are steadfastly opposed to voting the resources or tolerating the casualties that render such a policy sustainable. Even when an operation is apparently progressing well or is of vital importance to the United States - as in Haiti or over Mexico - the first instinct on Capitol Hill is to set a date for termination or to bicker over the details. Given the absence of foreign policy focus in the November 1994 election and subsequent Republican concentration on domestic policy, the change of party control does not appear likely to overturn the fundamental premise that resources and stamina for foreign policy will continue to be meager - in point of fact, they may have to be reduced even further, if a balanced budget is indeed to be achieved early in the next century.

The good news is that, properly handled, this does not necessarily matter very much. The world is a much friendlier place. The bad news is that all too many of those who operate the levers of foreign policy - including not only government officials but journalists, commentators, think-tankers, academics, and lobbyists - stubbornly continue to resist making the necessary psychological adjustment to these new conditions. They encounter great difficulty in discarding the habits of undiscriminating global engagement formed while confronting - supremely successfully let it be said - the daunting challenges of the Cold War. Unfortunately, their reluctance to accept change may cause the inevitable reordering of America's role in the world to be transformed from a controlled process in which American influence is retained into an out-of-control, fully-fledged decline.

To speak of "decline" is still not pukka or kosher within the foreign policy elite, any more than it was in 1987 when Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers touched a raw nerve in the American body politic, acting like a gratuitous injury to a great athlete, a memento mori that America's best playing days might be behind it. So it is necessary to tip-toe around this concept. Nonetheless, the case can be made that, through its crucial psychological failure to come to terms with the sharp reduction in the resources available for foreign policy projects, this same foreign policy elite has failed to meet the challenge of guiding the nation through the current transition to a post-superpower age. Refusing to acknowledge intellectually and emotionally that times have changed, they persist in over-promising what they cannot deliver - a habit that has caused endless chaos and poor policy choices as rhetorical excesses run ahead of hard reality.

In his book Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger describes the United States as "an island off the shores of the large landmass of Eurasia." This brings to mind another offshore island where another foreign policy elite of a similar temperament and outlook to their modern American counterparts made the same mistake of preferring prestige over substance in the wake of its greatest triumph in war. The story is well-known, but may still be worth retelling today - not as a straight-line predictor of what will happen in the United States but as a cautionary tale of how foreign policy miscalculations can exact harsh penalties on domestic welfare.

Some thirty years ago, Dean Acheson made his famous remark about the British - for it is, of course, of them that we are speaking - as having lost an empire and being unable to find a role. Today, the United States finds itself in a similar predicament. It too has "lost" an empire - the Soviet Union, opposition to which provided the defining mold for three generations of policy-makers. Civilized people everywhere have good reason to be grateful for the fortitude of American purpose displayed during this period. Gratitude, however, cannot disguise the fact that, with their mission accomplished, today's Americans, like the British before them, are struggling to find a new role.

The British struggle took many false turns and even today the deep ideological fissures in the ruling Conservative party over European policy show that it is far from fully resolved. Unfortunately, there are disquieting signs that American officials - aided and abetted by the wider foreign policy community - seem inclined to repeat the central British failure to bring resources and aspirations into a sustainable equilibrium.

The Folly of Make-Believe

If their status as two offshore islands were their only common characteristic, Britain and America would have little to learn from each other. They are very different countries and the history of one does not transfer automatically to the other. In terms of raw statistics of military power, wealth, size, and population - the variables populating the equations of systems analysts - any comparison between Britain and the United States seems risible.

With regard to foreign policy attitudes, however, the parallels are striking. The psychological culture of the foreign policy elites in London in the immediate aftermath to World War II and in Washington in the wake of the Cold War triumph are notably close. Selwyn Lloyd, foreign secretary at the time of the 1956 Suez debacle, has portrayed the British foreign policy debate in the 1940s and 1950s in terms very similar to those now playing out in the United States: whereas in Britain the conservatives accused the Labourites of "scuttling" on imperial responsibilities, in this country Republicans accuse Democrats of abandoning "leadership" and exempt defense spending from the budget knife; whereas British socialists set out in the 1950s to bestow their vision of good governance on the nations emerging from colonization, today's American liberals talk of "democratic enlargement" and the reconstruction of "failed states." At a remove of half a century, the British would immediately empathize with their American colleagues in their struggles to reinvent their global roles.

The British mistake - and the implicit warning for the United States today - lay in choosing to play a game of diplomatic make-believe, fooling the British themselves and the rest of the world for the best part of fifty years. Even when in 1947 the British were informing the Americans that they would no longer be able to sustain their position in Greece and Turkey - in retrospect the defining moment in British postwar diplomatic history - they were preening themselves on their superior brain power, as in the well-known doggerel:

In Washington Lord Halifax Once whispered to Lord Keynes, It's true they...